Book Description

From one of the most beloved authors of our time - more than six million copies of his books have been sold in this country alone - a fascinating excursion into the history behind the place we call home.

"Houses aren't refuges from history. They are where history ends up."

Bill Bryson and his family live in a Victorian parsonage in a part of England where nothing of any great significance has happened since the Romans decamped. Yet one day, he began to consider how very little he knew about the ordinary things of life as he found it in that comfortable home. To remedy this, he formed the idea of journeying about his house from room to room to "write a history of the world without leaving home."

The bathroom provides the occasion for a history of hygiene; the bedroom, sex, death, and sleep; the kitchen, nutrition and the spice trade; and so on, as Bryson shows how each has fig­ured in the evolution of private life. Whatever happens in the world, he demonstrates, ends up in our house, in the paint and the pipes and the pillows and every item of furniture.

Bill Bryson has one of the liveliest, most inquisitive minds on the planet, and he is a master at turning the seemingly isolated or mundane fact into an occasion for the most diverting exposi­tion imaginable. His wit and sheer prose fluency make At Home one of the most entertaining books ever written about private life.

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Sample Chapter

THE YEAR

I

In the autumn of 1850, in Hyde Park in London, there arose a most
extraordinary structure: a giant iron-and-glass greenhouse covering
nineteen acres of ground and containing within its airy vastness enough
room for four St. Paul's Cathedrals. For the short time of its
existence, it was the biggest building on Earth. Known formally as the
Palace of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations,
it was incontestably magnificent, but all the more so for being so
sudden, so startlingly glassy, so gloriously and unexpectedly there.
Douglas Jerrold, a columnist for the weekly magazine Punch, dubbed it
the Crystal Palace, and the name stuck.

It had taken just five months to build. It was a miracle that it was
built at all. Less than a year earlier it had not even existed as an
idea. The exhibition for which it was conceived was the dream of a civil
servant named Henry Cole, whose other principal claim to history's
attention is as the inventor of the Christmas card (as a way of
encouraging people to use the new penny post). In 1849, Cole visited the
Paris Exhibition-a comparatively parochial affair, limited to French
manufacturers-and became keen to try something similar in England, but
grander. He persuaded many worthies, including Prince Albert, to get
excited about the idea of a great exhibition, and on January 11, 1850,
they held their first meeting with a view to opening on May 1 of the
following year. This gave them slightly less than fifteen months to
design and erect the largest building ever envisioned, attract and
install tens of thousands of displays from every quarter of the globe,
fit out restaurants and restrooms, employ staff, arrange insurance and
police protection, print up handbills, and do a million other things, in
a country that wasn't at all convinced it wanted such a costly and
disruptive production in the first place. It was a patently unachievable
ambition, and for the next several months they patently failed to
achieve it. In an open competition, 245 designs for the exhibition hall
were submitted. All were rejected as unworkable.

Facing disaster, the committee did what committees in desperate
circumstances sometimes do: it commissioned another committee with a
better title. The Building Committee of the Royal Commission for the
Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations consisted of
four men-Matthew Digby Wyatt, Owen Jones, Charles Wild, and the great
engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel-and a single instruction, to come up
with a design worthy of the greatest exhibition in history, to begin in
ten months, within a constrained and shrunken budget. Of the four
committee members, only the youthful Wyatt was a trained architect, and
he had not yet actually built anything; at this stage of his career he
made his living as a writer. Wild was an engineer whose experience was
almost exclusively with boats and bridges. Jones was an interior
decorator. Only Brunel had experience with large-scale projects. He was
indubitably a genius but an unnerving one, as it nearly always took epic
infusions of time and cash to find a point of intersection between his
soaring visions and an achievable reality.

The structure the four men came up with now was a thing of unhappy
wonder. A vast, low, dark shed of a building, pregnant with gloom, with
all the spirit and playfulness of an abattoir, it looked like something
designed in a hurry by four people working separately. The cost could
scarcely be calculated, but it was almost certainly unbuildable anyway.
Construction would require thirty million bricks, and there was no
guarantee that such a number could be acquired, much less laid, in time.
The whole was to be capped off by Brunel's contribution: an iron dome
two hundred feet across-a striking feature, without question, but rather
an odd one on a one-story building. No one had ever built such a massive
thing of iron before, and Brunel couldn't of course begin to tinker and
hoist until there was a building beneath it-and all of this to be
undertaken and completed in ten months, for a project intended to stand
for less than half a year. Who would take it all down afterward and what
would become of its mighty dome and millions of bricks were questions
too uncomfortable to consider.

Into this unfolding crisis stepped the calm figure of Joseph Paxton,
head gardener of Chatsworth House, principal seat of the Duke of
Devonshire (but located in that peculiar English way in Derbyshire).
Paxton was a wonder. Born into a poor farming family in Bedfordshire in
1803, he was sent out to work as an apprentice gardener at the age of
fourteen; he so distinguished himself that within six years he was
running an experimental arboretum at the new and prestigious
Horticultural Society (soon to become the Royal Horticultural Society)
in West London-a startlingly responsible job for someone who was really
still just a boy. There one day he fell into conversation with the Duke
of Devonshire, who owned neighboring Chiswick House and rather a lot of
the rest of the British Isles-some two hundred thousand acres of
productive countryside spread beneath seven great stately homes. The
duke took an instant shine to Paxton, not so much, it appears, because
Paxton showed any particular genius as because he spoke in a strong,
clear voice. The duke was hard of hearing and appreciated clarity of
speech. Impulsively, he invited Paxton to be head gardener at
Chatsworth. Paxton accepted. He was twenty-two years old.

It was the most improbably wise move any aristocrat has ever made.
Paxton leaped into the job with levels of energy and application that
simply dazzled. He designed and installed the famous Emperor Fountain,
which could send a jet of water 290 feet into the air-a feat of
hydraulic engineering that has since been exceeded only once in Europe;
built the largest rockery in the country; designed a new estate village;
became the world's leading expert on the dahlia; won prizes for
producing the country's finest melons, figs, peaches, and nectarines;
and created an enormous tropical hothouse, known as the Great Stove,
which covered an acre of ground and was so roomy within that Queen
Victoria, on a visit in 1843, was able to tour it in a horse-drawn
carriage. Through improved estate management, Paxton eliminated £1
million from the duke's debts. With the duke's blessing, he launched and
ran two gardening magazines and a national daily newspaper, the Daily
News, which was briefly edited by Charles Dickens. He wrote books on
gardening, invested so wisely in the shares of railway companies that he
was invited onto the boards of three of them, and at Birkenhead, near
Liverpool, designed and built the world's first municipal park. This
park so captivated the American landscape architect Frederick Law
Olmsted that he modeled Central Park in New York on it. In 1849, the
head botanist at Kew sent Paxton a rare and ailing lily, wondering if he
could save it. Paxton designed a special hothouse and-you won't be
surprised to hear-within three months had the lily flowering.

When he learned that the commissioners of the Great Exhibition were
struggling to find a design for their hall, it occurred to him that
something like his hothouses might work. While chairing a meeting of a
committee of the Midland Railway, he doodled a rough design on a piece
of blotting paper and had completed drawings ready for review in two
weeks. The design actually broke all the competition rules. It was
submitted after the closing date and, for all its glass and iron, it
incorporated many combustible materials-acres of wooden flooring, for
one thing-which were strictly forbidden. The architectural consultants
pointed out, not unreasonably, that Paxton was not a trained architect
and had never attempted anything on this scale before. But then, of
course, no one had. For that reason, nobody could declare with complete
confidence that the scheme would work. Many worried that the building
would grow insupportably warm when filled with baking sunshine and
jostling crowds. Others feared that the lofty glazing bars would expand
in the summer's heat and that giant panes of glass would silently fall
out and crash onto the throngs below. The profoundest worry was that the
whole frail-looking edifice would simply blow away in a storm.

So the risks were considerable and keenly felt, yet after only a few
days of fretful hesitation the commissioners approved Paxton's plan.
Nothing-really, absolutely nothing-says more about Victorian Britain and
its capacity for brilliance than that the century's most daring and
iconic building was entrusted to a gardener. Paxton's Crystal Palace
required no bricks at all-indeed, no mortar, no cement, no foundations.
It was just bolted together and sat on the ground like a tent. This was
not merely an ingenious solution to a monumental challenge but also a
radical departure from anything that had ever been tried before.

The central virtue of Paxton's airy palace was that it could be
prefabricated from standard parts. At its heart was a single component-
a cast-iron truss three feet wide and twenty-three feet, three inches
long-which could be fitted together with matching trusses to make a
frame on which to hang the building's glass-nearly a million square feet
of it, or a third of all the glass normally produced in Britain in a
year. A special mobile platform was designed that moved along the roof
supports, enabling workmen to install eighteen thousand panes of glass a
week-a rate of productivity that was, and is, a wonder of efficiency. To
deal with the enormous amount of guttering required- some twenty miles
in all-Paxton designed a machine, manned by a small team, that could
attach two thousand feet of guttering a day-a quantity that would
previously have represented a day's work for three hundred men. In every
sense the project was a marvel.

Paxton was very lucky in his timing, for just at the moment of the Great
Exhibition glass suddenly became available in a way it never had before.
Glass had always been a tricky material. It was not particularly easy to
make, and really hard to make well, which is why for so much of its
history it was a luxury item. Happily, two recent technological
breakthroughs had changed that. First, the French invented plate
glass-so called because the molten glass was spread across tables known
as plates. This allowed for the first time the creation of really large
panes of glass, which made shop windows possible. Plate glass, however,
had to be cooled for ten days after being rolled out, which meant that
each table was unproductively occupied most of the time, and then each
sheet required a lot of grinding and polishing. This naturally made it
expensive. In 1838, a cheaper refinement was developed-sheet glass. This
had most of the virtues of plate glass, but it cooled faster and needed
less polishing, and so could be made much more cheaply. Suddenly glass
of a good size could be produced economically in limitless volumes.

Allied with this was the timely abolition of two long-standing taxes:
the window tax and glass tax (which, strictly speaking, was an excise
duty). The window tax dated from 1696 and was sufficiently punishing
that people really did avoid putting windows in buildings where they
could. The bricked-up window openings that are such a feature of many
period buildings in Britain today were once usually painted to look like
windows. (It is sometimes rather a shame that they aren't still.) The
tax, sorely resented as "a tax on air and light," meant that many
servants and others of constrained means were condemned to live in
airless rooms.

The second duty, introduced in 1746, was based not on the number of
windows but on the weight of the glass within them, so glass was made
thin and weak throughout the Georgian period, and window frames had to
be compensatingly sturdy. The well-known bull's-eye panes also became a
feature at this time. They are a consequence of the type of glassmaking
that produced what was known as crown glass (so called because it is
slightly convex, or crown-shaped). The bull's-eye marked the place on a
sheet of glass where the blower's pontil-the blowing tool-had been
attached. Because that part of the glass was flawed, it escaped the tax
and so developed a certain appeal among the frugal. Bull's-eye panes
became popular in cheap inns and businesses, and at the backs of private
homes where quality was not an issue. The glass levy was abolished in
1845, just shy of its hundredth anniversary, and the abolition of the
window tax followed, conveniently and fortuitously, in 1851. Just at the
moment when Paxton wanted more glass than anyone ever had before, the
price was reduced by more than half. This, along with the technological
changes that independently boosted production, made the Crystal Palace
possible.

The finished building was precisely 1,851 feet long (in celebration of
the year), 408 feet across, and almost 110 feet high along its central
spine-spacious enough to enclose a much admired avenue of elms that
would otherwise have had to be felled. Because of its size, the
structure required a lot of inputs-293,655 panes of glass, 33,000 iron
trusses, and tens of thousands of feet of wooden flooring-yet thanks to
Paxton's methods, the final cost came in at an exceedingly agreeable
£80,000. From start to finish, the work took just under
thirty-five weeks. St. Paul's Cathedral had taken thirty-five years.

Two miles away the new Houses of Parliament had been under construction
for a decade and still weren't anywhere near complete. A writer for
Punch suggested, only half in jest, that the government should
commission Paxton to design a Crystal Parliament. A catchphrase arose
for any problem that proved intractable: "Ask Paxton."

The Crystal Palace was at once the world's largest building and its
lightest, most ethereal one. Today we are used to encountering glass in
volume, but to someone living in 1851 the idea of strolling through
cubic acres of airy light inside a building was dazzling-indeed,
giddying. The arriving visitor's first sight of the Exhibition Hall from
afar, glinting and transparent, is really beyond our imagining. It would
have seemed as delicate and evanescent, as miraculously improbable, as a
soap bubble. To anyone arriving at Hyde Park, the first sight of the
Crystal Palace, floating above the trees, sparkling in sunshine, would
have been a moment of knee-weakening splendor.

II

As the Crystal Palace rose in London, 110 miles to the northeast, beside
an ancient country church under the spreading skies of Norfolk, a rather
more modest edifice went up in 1851 in a village near the market town of
Wymondham: a parsonage of a vague and rambling nature, beneath an
irregular rooftop of barge-boarded gables and jaunty chimney stacks in a
cautiously Gothic style-"a good-sized house, and comfortable enough in a
steady, ugly, respectable way," as Margaret Oliphant, a hugely popular
and prolific Victorian novelist, described the breed in her novel The
Curate in Charge.